Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

From biology to mathematics: the neighbor-joining algorithm

Colloquium

Speaker:

Lior Pachter, UC Berkeley

Location:

2112 MSB

Start time:

Tue, Nov 13 2007, 4:10PM

The neighbor-joining algorithm is a popular phylogenetic
tree inference method invented by two biologists (Naruya Saitou and
Masatoshi Nei) in 1987. During the past twenty years there have been
numerous attempts to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the
algorithm. We will explain a number of recent results that provide a
clear picture of what the algorithm is optimizing, why it is robust,
and how it can be improved. In particular, we discuss interesting
mathematical connections to polyhedral geometry and explain the
relevance of the space M0,n(R).